Friday, 30 September 2011

An opera to take place inside a cabinet, preferably wooden, by Ergo Phizmiz.

The text is written by David Niven, from his autobiography "The Moon's a Balloon".

Made with two pieces of metal, an electric guitar, a musical saw, a midi keyboard, a cassette recorder, a floor tom, a plastic tube, a euphonium mouthpiece, the end of a recorder.Recorded September 2011, at Grindia, Bridport.

There is a domination in every triangle, they say. Two allies dominate the third. In the Ashley / Feldman / Lucier trinagle there is as many rotating alliances of the two against the other as you wish. Number one, let's say: involvement with the voice. Two: graphic scores. Then: composing dying sounds rather than the notes. And so it goes, endlessly, because there is an infinite number of experimental techniques in the works and lives of this triangle.

Despite its selectivity Playback Play is by now the most comprehensive presentation of the works by the three american composers in Poland (perhaps). But also – not really. Their works are sometimes almost impossible to present. Fine, Feldman is very precise but Lucier's pieces as they survive are close to being hypothetical. They need to be checked out rather than presented in front of the audience. And Ashley? Where are his early operas? The librettos are incomplete and if you are lucky enough to know them – you see they are not precisely the same as the content of the very few and incomplete recordings. What they seem to be altogether is perhaps a grand theory of disappearing. The disappearance of the reverberating sounds in Feldman. The disappearance of speech in noise – Lucier. The disappearance of the recordings and the scores of the Ashley early operas. This is the most we can have. But at least let's have it as an airy way to approach the agony of contemporary music which – it seems – dies out just like their sounds and pieces. Playback Play is an arch from the performances of the pieces to pure phantasies on the ones which are not there anymore. Or to put the same thing in other words: a week long session of musicians who agreed to broaden the compositions of the three american composers with their own experiences and iterests.